132 animal, vegetable, miracle
their celebrity gurus. What would it take to convince us that an hour
spent rendering up cheese in our kitchens could be worth the trouble? A
motivational speaker, a pal, an artisan—a Cheese Queen, maybe?
Yes, all of the above, and she exists. Her name is Ricki Carroll. Since
1978, when she founded New En gland Cheesemaking Supply and began
holding workshops in her kitchen, she has directly taught more than
7,000 people how to make cheese. That’s face to face, not counting those
of us who ordered supplies online and worked our way through her book,
Cheesemaking Made Easy, which has sold over 100,000 copies. An Inter-
net search for Cheese Queen will pop her right up.
When I went to see Ricki, it was equal parts admiration and curiosity.
If my family is into reconnecting with the processes that bring us our
foods, if we’ve taken it upon ourselves to be a teeny bit evangelical about
this, we have a lot to learn from Ricki Carroll. We’re just small- time coun-
try preachers. This woman has inspired artisans from the Loire to Las
Vegas. She’s the Billy Graham of Cheese.
Okay, not really. She’s just Ricki. She starts to win you over when you
step onto the porch of her Massachusetts farmhouse, a colorful Queen
Anne with lupines and lilies blooming around the stoop. Then you walk
through the door and fall through the looking glass into a space where
cheesemaking antiques blend with the whimsy of handmade dolls wink-
ing at African masks, unusual musical instruments and crazy quilts con-
versing quietly in several languages. The setting prepares you to meet the
Queen, greeting her workshop guests with a smile, waving everyone into
the big kitchen as she pins up her wildly curly hair with a parrot- shaped
barrette.
Ricki had invited our family to come for a visit, after hearing of our in-
terest in local and artisanal foods. Generously, she let us and half a dozen
of our friends sit in as her guests at an all- day workshop for beginning
cheesemakers. Now we sat down at long tables and introduced ourselves
to the twenty other workshoppers. I was already taking notes, not on
cheesemaking, but on who in the heck comes here and does this thing?
Anybody. For several men it was an extremely original Father’s Day
gift. A chef hoped to broaden her culinary range; mothers were after
healthy, more local diets for their families. Martha, from Texas, owns wa-